We visited academics from two programs: NSRCEL, which is a business incubation unit at the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore (IIMB) and the Management Program at IIT-Madras in Chennai. While IIMB is not formally involved in SE, our meeting with the professors at NSRCEL gave us an introduction to entrepreneurship education in India.
A few days later in Chennai, my meeting with Dr. Ganesh of IIT-Madras revealed that next year they will begin offering a two-year minor in SE for their graduate students. The minor will have a formal curriculum and experiential learning components that will be run by the Rural Innovations Network (RIN). The experiential learning program will work with graduate volunteers and others to incubate innovative solutions to solve problems in rural development. This program is called L-RAMP.
Personally, I am quite excited to be exposed to organizations that are thinking about appropriate technology solutions for the poor. These are important connections that we need as our program builds long-run capabilities to help Wooster Nagar and expand into the rural sector.
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Both these universities are amongst the most reputable in India. They are state-supported graduate institutions that are incredibly hard to get into. Students that do get a highly technical, world-class education. Furthermore, these institutions have compelling records in consulting and research. Their openness to meet with a representative of an undergraduate institution was affirming. Why visit such organizations? The answer is simple. When we work in India, our goal is to construct interdisciplinary teams of local and foreign “talent.” These teams will design appropriate SE solutions drawing from local knowledge. We need to know what the elite academic circles are doing in the SE space. We also need to let them know what we are doing in order to understand if they are better local models of delivering SE pedagogy. |
Not one IIMB or IIT-Madras faculty questioned my reasoning that driven undergraduates, with the right inputs and encouragement, can answer similar questions to graduate students. It really is about how you construct the experience. I explained how our SE program has developed more refined plans because of the managed approach we take to constructing teams and narrowing the questions to match the skill-set of our students and faculty. SE is not the only program that meets the student where they are and raises them above the potential of most undergraduates: AMRE and IS are both similar and more well-established programs that do the same. This is why Wooster is a “college that changes lives,” is it not?
Both IIMB and IIT-Madras were affirming of our program by sharing examples of similar partnerships they have had with larger US institutions such as MIT, Cornell, and University of Michigan. Our meetings were positive with promises to share curricular ideas and work together on individuals projects on a case-by-case basis. As an aside, I wish Wooster were bold enough to incubate student projects like NSRCEL and L-RAMP. I think Wooster would be one of a handful of liberal arts institutions if not the only one that turns ideas into action for the global good. That is something I can get behind!
We will continue to maintain a working relationship with both institutions as we grow GSE in India.
Just catching up after being off-line, and enjoying the high-quality of your blog entries. It’s inspiring and overwhelming at the same time to think of how much you accomplished, and how much there is to do. One of the challenges, I imagine, will be where – and how big – to start.
Jessica. You hit upon an important set of questions that we are in the process of figuring out. We are closer to the answering the “where” question. But, we are not clear on the “how big”. There are two schools of thought on program size. One says, “start big”, and the other says, “start small and get your feet wet and scale up” (if scale does not compromise your mission). Each strategy has its pros and cons. For example, starting big allows us to have a large impact across constituents and stakeholders as well as momentum to move forward regardless of obstacles. The disadvantage is that we risk a lot more if we fail in large programmatic areas. We also open ourselves to a wider amount of criticism. Part of the entrepreneurial mindset is figuring out if we start big, how the risks of failure can be minimized. The advantage of starting small is that we can begin to understand what the program needs are. Starting small will also give our partners time to ramp-up and contemplate the way in which they will integrate with the program. It is an interesting question that I believe is yet to be answered for a networked and decentralized program like what we hope to build. What are your thoughts on this? Anyone else, please feel free to chime in.
Laura daughter of Debbie observes that her mother uses more run on sentences than Laura herself does.
thanks for continuing to update the blog, eventhough you are due back in Wooster as I write, do not leave us hanging,once the jetlag is gone we anticipate the “rest of the story”. Debbie mom of Laura